


Golden day blues

by Yuu_chi



Series: Incarnate 'verse [1]
Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, End Game Spoilers, End goal happiness, Fix-It, M/M, Major Spoilers, Reincarnation, Reunion, Trauma and recovery, for both rdr2 and rdr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-05 16:24:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16814215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yuu_chi/pseuds/Yuu_chi
Summary: Arthur is given a second chance. Some days it feels like a gift - other days it feels like a punishment.





	1. Chapter 1

Arthur dies in 1899. It ain’t a great death, he supposes, but it also could have been worse. He did good right at the end there. Made amends for some of the mistakes in his life. Mostly, when he closed his eyes for that final time, he remembers feeling relief.

He’s had enough. Let him rest.

He rests for eighty-six years. And then the god forsaken universe has the _nerve_ to spit him back out again.

Arthur had met more than one Incarnate in his life; the unlucky folks who got reborn years after their death. He’d always thought that sounded downright miserable. Why on earth would he ever want to do this _again_? Once was more than enough.

He’s born for the second time in a Texas hospital in 1985 to a single-mother who had more than enough on her plate already by the time Arthur came along. He knows from the moment he’s capable of thinking beyond pissing and shitting who he is and where he came from.

Incarnate laws in Texas are looser than some of the other states. Record keeping ain’t as strict. One don’t have to report themselves unless they wanna, and Arthur sure as fuck don’t.

By the time he’s thirteen, his mother says to him, “You’re the grimmest teenager I ever saw, child of mine. It’s like you’ve got the whole world on your skinny little shoulders.”

Arthur, who is technically older than his own mother, says, “This is just the face you gave me, ma. I’m doing the best I can with it.”

That gets a small smile out of her at the very least, which is more than Arthur gets on most days. His mother had a bad run of life, and although Arthur has never told her the truth, she’s far too smart not to suspect - and no mother wishes for a child who was never a child at all.

High school is... tolerable. Something Arthur could have done without, honestly. He’s got an alright head on his shoulders, but he never was much for book learning. It’s downright patronizing sitting in a classroom for six hours a day, learning things he ain’t got no need for.

(he does well in art. Hilariously bad in history. It turns out people are more interested in what the records say than the truth.)

He scrapes passing grades for his mother's sake if not his own. She doesn’t make him go to graduation, which goes to prove that he’s not the only one aware that they’re walking a delicate balance of compromises.

Two weeks later, he leaves home. He doesn’t bother telling the one or two friends he’d kept throughout the hell that was the mandatory modern education system. They’d been alright, but Arthur has little interest in spending time with people full decades younger than him.

His ma ain’t say much about it. “Call often,” she insists, pressing a wad of bills into his resisting hands. “I know you like to think you’re above all worldly restraints, but I will hunt you down and skin you alive myself if you try and ghost me.”

“I know, ma,” Arthur says, as patiently as he’s learnt how.

“I did not spend fifteen hours in labour to push out an ungrateful degenerate who doesn’t even know how to call his own mother, old soul or not.”

“ _I’ll call_ ,” Arthur says. “Jesus, ma.”

Satisfied, she pats him lightly on the cheek and then all but pushes him out the door. “Get gone then. Hopefully you’ll find somebody better equipped to put up with your shit.”

Arthur goes. He works his way across the states. He stops for a few weeks in Missouri when the money he’d left with runs dry. There’s not a lot of work for somebody with barely a high school diploma and unreasonably high standards for employment, so he finds the nearest back-bar poker gamer and cleans it up.

Admittedly, folks ain’t too cheerful about having their savings swept away by a scowling eighteen-year-old, but Arthur still remembers how to throw a mean right hook, and he heads to Tennessee with a pocket full of cash and some fresh bruises he wears with nostalgic pride.

He breezes around the state for the better part of three years, gambling and occasionally working as a ranch hand. He never did lose his touch with horses, and if there’s one thing that time has done right, it’s horse rearing.

Eventually, he leaves there too. He keeps heading east, for no real reason other than he wants to. It’s a strange change of pace, but he thinks he could grow to like it.

In a biker bar in North Carolina a man who looks a good ten years older than him buys him a drink. He’s alright, Arthur supposes. He’s never had high standards when it comes to men, but he hadn’t really been looking.

“What’s your name?” Arthur asks.

The man offers him a smile and says, “John.”

“Aw, shit,” Arthur says, downs the drink, and goes home with him.

The sex is incredibly mediocre, but Arthur’s had worse. He doesn’t honestly remember much about it other than gasping “ _John_ ” right before he comes.

Arthur sneaks out at just past three in the morning, and by the time the sun rises he’s halfway to Virginia.

.

On his twenty-eighth birthday, Arthur makes the incredibly drunk choice to register as an Incarnate.

He’s in Iowa, and he’s feeling nauseatingly homesick for a place and people that no longer exists. It’s a dumb thing to think about, but he’s officially older now than John was, that last time he saw him.

He doesn’t know why that should matter. It doesn’t, not really. If there’s a god out there, John hopefully went on to live a long, full life - he got a chance to grow old and die with Abigail and Jack, and live out all the things that were taken from him when he joined the gang.

But Arthur’s mind sticks on it. It sticks on it something fierce. All he can think about is Dutch and the gang - Charles and Lenny and even goddamn Micah Bell, who Arthur wouldn’t have pissed on if he were on fire.

He misses waking up in the morning to the sound of the girls grumbling over the coffee pot, Hosea and Abigail teaching Jack his letters so that he stood a chance at having a better life than the rest of them. The sound of white-tail deer crashing through the trees, Uncle snoring by the fire, Swanson staggering drunkenly around and making a general nuisance of himself.

And, of course, John.

Arthur doesn’t think he’s ever gone a day in either of his lives without missing John Marston one way or another.

He’s always thought that it don’t matter none if he has a piece of paper that told him who he was or not. As long as Arthur knew the truth, that was enough.

Right now, it doesn't feel like enough. Right now, he doesn’t know how anything could possibly ever _be_ enough.

Everybody is dead. His gang - his _family_ \- they’re gone. Some of them got to live on without him, grow old without him, and die without him. And he didn’t get to be there for that - but he gets to be here for _this_?

It ain’t fair. It ain’t _fair_.

He makes an appointment with the Incarnation Registry Office while he’s drunk off his ass, but the next morning when he’s hungover and miserable he makes the choice to keep it.

The building is neat and small, tucked between a family dentist and some other niche government building Arthur hopes he never has to set foot in. The waiting room smells like bleach and lavender and it makes his eyes water fiercely.

A stern-looking woman with a badge the reads ‘DEBORAH’ collects him after a ten-minute wait. There’s a worn smiley face sticker at the edge of her badge.

He’s taken to a cluttered office and directed to a wobbly looking chair.

“Please take a seat, Mr. Collins,” she says, and Arthur does. “Now, you’re here to register as an Incarnate, is that right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says awkwardly. He has a thumping headache and he hopes desperately he doesn’t look as sick as he feels.

She looks him up and down. Whatever she sees does not seem to impress her. “If I may ask, you’re awfully old to only be registering now.”

That wasn’t exactly a question, but Arthur humours her. “I didn’t think much of this whole thing,” Arthur says. “Didn’t seem to matter if anybody else knows the truth but me.”

Deborah raises a brow. “What changed?”

Arthur thinks about bullshitting her, giving a canned answer, but he’s tired and he’s still homesick, and he thinks this might just be one of the rare occasions that honesty serves him well. “It was my birthday last night,” he says. “Twenty-eight. Ain’t nothin’ big, not really, but I had - I had a friend. And I realized I’m older now than I ever got the chance to see him be.” Arthur clears his throat and looked fixedly down at the desk. Somebody has etched their initials into it, and he passes his thumb along the rough wood, wondering what lifetime those letters belonged to. “And that’s… that’s something, isn’t it? I’m here, and he ain’t - and that should matter.”

It’s quiet for a moment. Arthur can hear the fan above them spinning squeakily, the outside sound of traffic passing by. It’s so fucking muggy that Arthur can feel sweat beading at his neck, sticking at the collar of the single nice shirt he thought he ought to wear for this.

“Yes,” Deborah says eventually, and her voice is just that little bit softer. “I should think that matters a great deal, Mr. Collins.”

Arthur glances up. She’s looking at him with something that might be understanding and might be pity. “There’s a lot of paperwork involved in this, but you seem like a man who knows what he’s doing, and I’ll be happy to walk you through it.”

Relief is a cool sweep rushing through him.

“Yeah,” Arthur says, voice a little hoarse. He clears his throat. “Yeah, that’d be good, thank you.”

They go through it all together, and she’d been right - it’s nothing short of a nightmare. There’s a lot of questions Arthur doesn’t actually know the answer to (Where was your place of passing? - List any surviving relatives - Were you charged with any crimes at the time of your death?) but in the end he thinks they do alright.

It’s rougher than he thought it would be writing down some of the details of his life. Certainly, he never thought he’d be filling out a little box labeled “date of your death” but here he is.

“Okay,” Deborah says, snapping the filled-out paperwork together into a thick pile. “Only one question left, and I want you to think about this one, alright?”

“I ain’t much good at thinking, but I’ll give it a shot.”

“Do you want your information to be listed on the accessible database for other Incarnates?” Deborah asks. “That way, if anybody from your past life has also been reincarnated, they’ll be able to reach out to you. And you’ll be able to search and reach out for them.”

“No,” Arthur says, immediately and without pause. “No, I - no thanks, ma’am.”

“Are you sure?” Deborah says. “It’s a simple addition.”

Arthur shakes his head fiercely. “I’m sure,” he says. “I don’t - I don’t need that. I know the statistics. I don’t need the temptation to…”

He can’t bring himself to finish the sentence. Arthur does not need to be given false hope. He does not need the reminder that he’s alone out here.

Deborah doesn’t push him further. “Alright,” she says, shuffling the papers together. “I’ll get this sorted for you. We’ll call you once the paperwork has gone through. You do know that you have the legal right to reclaim your name if you so wish?”

Arthur offers her a smile. “I reckon I’m alright,” he says. “I already went through the pain of changing my first name through the normal means as soon as I could.”

She nods and gets to her feet. Arthur hurries to copy her, and she surprises him by sticking out a hand. “It’s been good to meet you, Mr. Collins. I hope everything goes well for you.”

Surprisingly touched, Arthur takes it. “And you,” he says. “Thank you for your help. Means more to me than I reckon you know.”

“It was no trouble,” she insists, and Arthur doesn't argue because he doesn’t think he could ever convey the depth of his gratitude for her small kindnesses.

It doesn’t fix anything, not really. But he thinks this might be the first time in his whole damn life he’s been able to sit down and tell somebody what he is - _who_ is he - and have them understand.

And that, at least, is worth something.

.

For the next few years, Arthur lives his life in pretty much exactly the same way.

He stays in one place only long enough to get enough money to travel to the next. He calls his mother every other weekend, and she makes sure to keep him posted on the riveting local affairs of their podunk hometown.

By the time he’s thirty, Arthur has the realization that he is, in fact, miserable.

He remembers telling Hosea more than once that he was never one to settle down, and he stands by that, but he’s starting to think that his itchy feet might have had more to do with the company he was in rather than a general inclination towards wandering.

He’s seen more of the country than he ever got to the first time around - even spent a brief stint in Mexico which was nice, and Alaska, which brought up all kinds of bad memories. Arthur’s fucked and fought his way through most of the USA’s continental population at this point, which would have been a dream back when he was dumb twenty-year-old the first time, and yet…

In Florida, he gets a knife pulled on him in a bar fight. Getting stabbed hurts a hell of a lot more than he remembers, and he’s a little disappointed with himself when the blood spurting out of his side takes him to his knees in less than a minute.

The man who stabbed him looks more scared than Arthur feels. When Arthur hits the floor, he books it out of the bar, pushing people aside in his hurry.

“Get back here!” Arthur hollers, making an aborted attempt to get to his feet. “This ain’t over yet!”

He means to give chase, but the world goes wonky and next thing he knows he’s on the ground, back to the bar. There are hands pressed to his side, and Arthur blinks at them stupidly, because unless his skin has gone about six shades darker in the past minute they sure don’t belong to me.

“Stop moving,” says a voice he does not recognize. “An ambulance is on its way, and if you die before they get here, I’m going to kill you even deader.”

Arthur cocks his head back and blinks.

It’s a woman; curly hair framing an incredibly annoyed looking face, as if Arthur has gone out of his way to inconvenience her.

“Who are you?” he slurs.

“Major,” she says shortly.

Arthur tries for a grin that feels deeply uncomfortable. “What’s that short for?”

“It’s short for ‘Stop Being Such A Major Pain In My Ass’,” she says. “Now shut up, you’re making the bleeding worse.”

Arthur makes an affronted noise, but obediently passes out. Distantly, he hopes that this doesn’t kill him. He doesn’t think he could deal with the embarrassment of being taken out by a single knife wielding coward.

Arthur does not die. He wakes up in a hospital bed he almost certainly cannot afford with an attractive and vaguely familiar woman sleeping in the armchair beside him.

“What,” Arthur says, “in the hell?”

The woman blinks awake with the perfect poise that Arthur has only ever seen in wild animals before. “Good morning,” she says. “You were stabbed in a roadside bar about fifteen hours ago. I saved your life.”

Arthur can see the faint remnants of blood crusted under her nails, and it’s a strange feeling to realize that not all that long ago it’d been inside his body. “And why would you do a thing like that?”

She gives him a strange look, and Arthur realizes that was perhaps a strange thing to say.

“My hippocratic oath keeps me from leaving people to bleed out on the floor no matter how incredibly fucking weird they are,” she says. She holds out a hand to him, and Arthur fumbles to take it, even though he feels like he has more pipes and wires plugged into him than is justifiable. “I’m sure you’ve forgotten, so I’ll tell you again; my name’s Major.”

“Major,” Arthur repeats. “It’s, uh. Thank you?”

She gives a wry smile. “Don’t thank me too much, Arthur,” she says. “You’ve still gotta get the bill for the hospital stay.”

“I don’t remember telling you my name.”

“Sweetheart, I’d be surprised if you remember much of anything from last night,” Major says, unsympathetic. “But yeah, I went through your wallet. Wanted to know what to tell the paramedics.”

Arthur thinks he might be madder about that if Major hadn’t earnt all the good grace he was capable of. “Alright,” he says. “I mean… why’d you stick around?”

“Wanted to ask you out for a drink when you woke up,” she says without batting an eye. “Platonically, I mean. Somewhere you won’t get stabbed. You seem like a fun sorta guy. Don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody screaming at the asshole who stabbed them to come back and finish the job.”

Arthur gives her a dry look. “Glad I made a good impression.”

“Go back to sleep,” she says kindly. “When you wake up I’ll introduce you to the good nurses.”

.

Arthur recovers from the stab wound at an annoyingly sedate pace. Used to be in the golden days he’d take a blade in the gut in the evening and be drinking again by the next morning.

Major, however, decides to stick with him through it all and true to her word introduces him to all the best nurses, including her best friend Steve, who reminds Arthur so much of Kieran Duffy that’s it’s uncanny.

“Why do you have to pick on him so much?” Major complains one day after Arthur mercilessly ribs Steve for the better part of an hour.

Arthur shrugs, watching fondly as Steve fetches their next round of drinks from the bar. “Reminds me of somebody I used to know,” he says, and then refuses to answer any more questions when pushed.

After that, life picks up a bit. Against all odds, he decides to stick around for longer than he’d planned. The good thing about living on the whim of all your choices is that he doesn’t have any commitments one way or another, and when six months in Florida stretches to ten, and then to a year, he surprises himself by not feeling the pull of far off lands.

He continues renting the same shithole of an apartment. He sees Major and Steve nearly every other day. He still refuses to get a steady job, but there’s enough odd-work going in the town that he doesn’t ever have to worry about it.

Arthur becomes a familiar face if not a friendly one. People learn his name. The coffee joint down the street recognizes him on sight. His favourite Chinese place has his regular order memorized.

For the first time in a very long time, he ain’t - he ain’t miserable. He doesn’t know if he’d go so far as to say he was _happy_ , but he sure as hell ain’t thinking idly about stepping in front of a train so much anymore, which has gotta be progress in and of itself.

He’s got friends. He’s got _stability_.

For Arthur, stability has never been about having his feet on the same stretch of dirt, but about the people who stand there with him. And he hadn’t realized how cripplingly lonely he’d been until the weight of it was lifted from his shoulders.

Arthur has never been a man made for being left alone. How could he have been, when for so long he’d been with his gang, the lot of them living right on top of one another?

It’s not quite the same with Major and Steve, but it’s something, and Arthur had never thought he’d get anything at all ever again.

He’s _content_.

He don’t know that he’ll ever be happy like this, when all he can think about are the people he misses and the chances he never got to take, but he can make do.

And that’s enough.

.

Of course, no sooner does Arthur finally feel like things are looking up do things decide to take an incredibly downward turn.

He’s out with Major and Steve at their favourite bar when he hears the news, the lot of them sitting at the counter for once so that they have a clear view of the TV.

“ _After a decade long debate, all information pertaining to the Incarnate Registration Act will be made a matter of public record,_ ” says the pretty redhead announcer. She sounds perky and cheerful, completely unconcerned that she’s demolishing Arthur’s world. “ _The bill is expected to pass next week, and as a result anybody will be able to access the names of any and all living Incarnates_.”

“Well, shit,” marvels Steve, setting down his beer with a thump. “Never thought they’d go through with it.”

“Shh,” hisses Major, slapping him on the shoulder, eyes glued to the TV. “I want to hear this.”

“ _Incarnates will be required to lodge their status in their city of residence, and there will be strict punishments for noncompliance including possible jail time. While not all have been happy with this decision, many state that it was only a matter of time._ ”

There’s more after that, but Arthur isn’t paying attention, too busy fishing enough cash from his pocket to pay for however many drinks he’s had. He’s relatively sure he vastly over tips, but he’s far past caring.

“S’cuse me,” he says to his friends, and then he ducks out back before they can say anything at all.

His hands are steady as he lights up a cigarette but inside he feels shaken to his very core.

Thirty-three fucking years he’s been kicking around, and now they finally decide he ain’t entitled to a bit of privacy. Who do they think they are, making this choice for him? How can anybody who isn’t an Incarnate possibly understand how it feels to lead two lives, so strangely disconnected and present at the same time?

Arthur blows out a fog of smoke. It clears the panicked thrumming drowning out all the thought in his head, but only a little.

Arthur does not consider his status a secret, but he does consider it… _his_. He has gone well out of his way to keep away prying questions and greedy hands that would muddy the pureness of his memory with their opinions.

He’s done everything he possibly can to keep it all separate because a part of him cannot bear the thought of that heartache seeing the light of day.

The door creaks open behind him and he turns to look.

“Hey,” Steve says, uncomfortable. “You alright, man?”

Arthur flicks the last of the ash from the end of his cigarette and drops it, grinding it furiously beneath the heel of his boot. “Peachy keen,” he says.

Steve hesitates. “You wanna talk about it?”

“No,” Arthur says. “But ask me again in a month.”

Steve doesn’t look any more reassured, but he steps back, allowing Arthur into the bar. He claps him on the shoulder as he passes and says, “Whatever it is, we’re ready to listen when you’re ready to talk.”

Arthur thinks about being twelve years old and killing a man for the first time. He remembers how shockingly warm the blood had felt as it splattered his skin. He remembers being thirty and looting the dead bodies of a couple dozen O’Driscoll’s who had thought they could out gun them. He remembers being thirty-six and dying alone in the dirt, watching the sun rise for the last time of his life.

Sometimes, when he looks into the mirror, he doesn’t recognize himself. He wonders just how Steve and Major will ever be able to look at him the same again once they finally see those parts of himself he’s done his best to keep buried deep.

“We’ll see,” Arthur says. “I guess we’ll see.”

.

The bill passes. There’s more than one protest, but in the end the weight of government bureaucracy is always far heavier than most people can bear the burden of. He catches snippets of it all in the newspaper and on the radio, but does he level best not to watch it too closely.

Two days after the Incarnate Registry Act officially becomes law, he gets a phone call.

“Mr. Collins,” says the monotone government employee on the other end. “This is a courtesy call to remind you that as of the sixteenth of this month, all Incarnate information is now public record.” The faint sound of papers shuffling through the phone line. “According to your files, you don’t have a current place or residence listed?”

Arthur’s been dreading this call with a fervency that defies description. “Well, you see, I move around a lot. For work. I ain’t got -.”

“What kind of work?”

Arthur glances over his shoulder to the poker table where his opponents are waiting impatiently. “That’s a private matter.”

“You have two weeks to lodge your place of residency with the registry,” says the clerk.

“Or else what?”

“Then you will be sent a warning. After that, you will be fined for each week you’re in violation of the law. After a certain period, you will be facing possible jail time.”

Arthur sighs, rubbing at his eyes. Inexplicably, he feels more exhausted than he can explain. “Alright,” he relents. “Is there paperwork I gotta fill out for this or…?”

“We can have it sent to you in the mail,” says the clerk.

“I gotta tell you my address for you to send it to me, can’t you just use that?”

“No.”

Arthur swears under his breath. Goddamn bureaucratic bastards and their inability to make anything easy on the people. “Okay, okay,” he says. “Here’s my damn address.”

He can hear the tapping of keys as the clerk copies it down, and then he ends the call with a polite, “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Collins.”

“Oh, go sit on a goddamn rattlesnake,” Arthur says, and hangs up viciously.

.

Honestly, other than being a pain in his ass, Arthur hadn’t expected much to change. If he keeps his head down and doesn’t cause no trouble he can’t run away from, he should be fine. There ain’t no reason for anybody to actually look him up, not really.

And there ain’t anybody he wants to look up either. He decided a long time ago that the past was better left as just that. He’s got enough scars over the soft parts of himself without picking at them until they bleed.

A week after the act passes, Arthur goes out for drinks with Major and Steve again. It’s been a while, and he’s mighty keen for anything strong enough to settle the faint fracture lines that are starting to grow inside of him, looking more like earthquake potential with every blow that hits.

Major buys the first round, handing Arthur a beer that tastes almost as bad as the piss Uncle used to smuggle back into the camp when nobody was paying enough attention to stop him. “You doing okay?” she asks. “You’ve been looking even more sour than usual lately.”

“Yeah,” Arthur says, settling at their small back room table. “Just had a bit of a rough few weeks.”

“I guess this is going to be another one of those things you don’t feel like talking about it?” Steve asks with a faint smile.

Arthur shrugs, noncommittal, and picks at the label of his bottle. “Ain’t that you lot aren’t good listeners,” he says. “I’m just not a great talker, I think.”

Major laughs. “It’s that southern drawl of yours,” she says. “Makes everything you say sound like it came straight from a cowboy western.”

Arthur pulls a face before he can help it. “Why you always gotta make that joke?” he complains. “Don’t you have any new material?”

“Oh, suck it up, pretty-boy,” Major says cheerfully. “I’m sure you’ve been called worse.”

Arthur goes to reply with something sufficiently biting, but he notices Major’s not looking at him anymore. She’s staring over his shoulder, her smile dimmed and polite as she watches somebody approaching.

There’s no reason for it, but Arthur feels his stomach drop. A wave of premonition hits him with all the subtleness of a truck. Inexplicably, Arthur thinks of the blind old man by the road he’d once thought was a prophet.

“Arthur Morgan.”

For a second, Arthur experiences a very real disconnect - he’s sitting in the back of a bar in the ass-end of Florida in 2018 - he’s nursing a cup of mediocre moonshine beside the campfire in 1890.

It’s not the voice he recognizes, which is softer than he’s used to, but the _tone_. The harsh sound of his name which is half hero worship and half disdain. So familiar that Arthur recognizes it even after a hundred year without it.

Steve and Major are staring behind him, eyebrows raised in polite inquiry. Arthur feels like he can taste his own heartbeat. Slowly, like the weight of the world is on his shoulders, he turns.

John looks - he looks the same but different. A sharper jaw, an unbroken nose. His eyes aren’t quite as beady. Handsome in that same roguish way though; too rough around the edges to ever bring home to your mother. His hair is cut exactly the same. Arthur really don’t know what to think about that.

 _You’re alive_ , he thinks, dizzy with the marvel of it all. _Holy shit, you’re here._

He’s so busy uselessly staring that it takes him several long, aching seconds to realize that John looks nothing short of absolutely furious. Even with his new face, it’s a good look on him.

Arthur means to say something useful, honest he does, but when he opens his mouth all that comes out is, “Holy _shit_.”

If the way John grabs him and hauls him to his feet is anything to go by, it is not the answer he’s looking for. Arthur stumbles and the pair of them knock over a chair. Major barely manages to scramble out of the way in time, shouting, “Woah, hey, what the fuck?”

“Son of a bitch,” John says, slamming him into a wall hard enough to rattle the windows.

“Hold up,” Arthur wheezes, grappling to keep them steady. “John, listen -.”

Arthur doesn't see the punch coming, but he sure as fuck feels it. It’s been a while since he’s been hit by somebody who knows what they’re doing, and John certainly doesn’t hold back. His vision goes wobbly for a second and there’s a faint ringing in his ears. He can just make out Major and Steve behind John’s back - Steve ashen-faced, hands over his mouth, and Major coming at them with the scariest fucking expression Arthur has ever seen. Faintly, he can see a beer bottle in her hand.

He foresees a future where Major brains John before they even get a good minute to talk, and that more than anything is what spurs him into action.

Arthur breaks John’s grip on him, grabbing him by the coat and switching their positions. He throws him against a wall, and then thrusts out a hand to stave off Major. “It’s okay, it’s okay - I got it, Major.”

“You ain’t got nothing, Morgan,” John snarls, and Arthur so very narrowly manages to lean back in time to avoid a spectacular headbutt. He’d forgotten the way John fought dirty - he shouldn’t have. He’d been the one to teach him after all.

From the corner of his eye, he can see Major ever reluctantly lowering her makeshift weapon. “Arthur, what the fuck?”

“Hold on up,” Arthur insists again, and refuses to shift his eyes from John. “This is an old friend.”

John snorts, mouth twisting into a wry, bitter smile. “Old friend, huh? Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

“Well, it’s true, ain’t it? Probably truer than most folks can claim.”

“I ain’t your friend, Morgan,” John says, and then spits in his face.

Arthur has to remind himself that he had more than one hand in raising the boy, and John really has more than a right to be mad at him for any number of things.

“No, I guess not,” Arthur agrees. “We’re family. How about we take this reunion somewhere more private.”

He grabs John by the scruff of his coat and hauls him out of the bar, ignoring Major and Steve as they shout after him, and John as he kicks and hollers.

Arthur doesn’t have much to take pride in, but at least he never did run from his problems, expecting other people to fight his battles for him.

There’s a back door leading out to an empty alley that Arthur likes to use when he needs a bit of air to clear his head, and he kicks it open, throwing John out there and slamming the door behind them. John stumbles down the steps and rams his shoulder into the opposing wall.

“Now,” Arthur says, swaggering down the steps. “Can we discuss this?”

John turns around, glaring daggers. Arthur can just see that he’s itching to take another swing at him, so he steps as close as he dares and holds up his hands in a peace offering. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

John looks about as indignant as Arthur has ever seen him. “What the hell’s the matter with _me?_ What the hell’s the matter with _you_?” John reaches out and seizes Arthur by his shirt front, slamming him back against the wall. “You find out you’re an Incarnate, and you don’t even _try_ to see if anybody from the gang came back around too? And you have the _guts_ to ask why I’m fucking mad?”

“It’s not like that,” Arthur says, grabbing John’s wrists and trying to pry him off. “I wasn’t thinking nothin’ like -.”

“Yeah, you clearly weren’t thinking.” John shoves him, and Arthur winces as the bricks dig in against his shoulder. “If that damn law making all our business public record hadn’t passed, I never would have even found you.”

“Look,” Arthur says, voice rising loud enough that he ought to be worried about the folks inside hearing. He ain’t really worried about much else other than John fucking Marston right now though, which is usually how things went. “The chances -.”

“But there was still a chance,” John says. He opens his arms wide, as if gesturing to the whole word. “I’m standing right here, Arthur. So clearly there was a fucking chance.”

Arthur very suddenly realizes it doesn’t matter what he says, he ain’t got a hope in hell of defusing the angry tension vibrating through them both. They were never the sort to talk out their problems. How could they have been, when they were raised on gunpowder and violence?

John has every right to be angry, and Arthur just don’t have the vocabulary he needs to explain why he did what he did. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, and the boys of the Van der Linde gang only ever responded to that in one way.

Arthur shrugs out of his coat, dropping it to the filthy alley floor. He turns around, meeting John’s half angry, half puzzled expression. “Well?” Arthur beckons at John with all the confidence that two lives worth of trouble making has taught him. “Are you gonna take a swing at me properly or not, boy?”

He’s barely got the last word out of his mouth before John is on him, knuckles scraping Arthur’s face and knee just barely missing his gut. It’s precisely the kind of fight that Arthur has been looking desperately for these past thirty years - furious and dirty.

Arthur manages to get a hand around the back of John’s neck and holds him still for just long enough to get in a few tight punches. John manages to break his grip and, before Arthur can even realize what he’s going to do, he tackles Arthur straight to the ground.

The shock of it sends the air whistling from his lungs, but Arthur barely gets a second of dazed blinking in before John grabs him by his shirt front and slugs him hard enough in the face that he worries that a tooth might have popped loose.

Arthur gets his arms up to protect his face, and then when John slows for a second in exhaustion, Arthur bucks him off furiously. They grapple on the ground, slamming each other to the concrete. There’s no coordination, just anger and momentum, and Arthur doesn’t even think about it when he slams his elbow into John’s face, sense memory and the instincts of a dozen bar brawls guiding him.

Blood explodes like a fountain, splattering them both, and John rears back, both hands clasped over his face. He looks faintly surprised, and Arthur feels contrite enough for both of them.

“This is the second time you’ve broken my damn nose, Morgan,” John says thickly. “If you’ve got a problem with my face, just come out and say it, you hear?”

Already Arthur can see the beginnings of a truly spectacular black eye blooming on John’s face, and there’s more than one graze freckled faintly with blood. Arthur himself feels like he just went ten rounds in the ring with somebody far out of his weight class, which to be fair is usually how all interactions with John leave him feeling.

With a suddenness that leaves him numb with longing, Arthur realizes just how fucking much he’d missed this - missed _John_.

“Aw, fuck,” Arthur says gruffly, and reels John in roughly for a biting kiss.

John tastes like fresh blood, and Arthur’s lips are stinging and swollen from that cruel punch John caught him with right near the end there. The shock of it and the flare of pain is enough to make them both hiss, but John’s hands are pulling at him. There’s no grace, no consideration, just bitterness and misery which is exactly how Arthur remembers this being.

It doesn’t go for that long. They’re in a filthy back alley and anybody could come out that door any minute. Also, Arthur thinks he might have a shallow concussion. John hadn’t learnt how to pull his damn punches, that was for sure.

When John feels Arthur pulling back he shoves, knocking them apart. His nose ain’t bleeding anymore, but there’s blood all over his face. Arthur can taste it in his mouth, and it’s a far better feeling than it ought to be.

The light out here is dim at best, and the shadows it casts on John’s bloody face are strangely disorientating. John’s slumped against the wall, and Arthur watches as he rubs at his jaw, flexing it a little to check if Arthur’s broken anything important.

Arthur doesn’t know what to say. They seem to be done throwing punches, and Arthur’s not sure he can stand to kiss John again right now. He feels rattled and overwhelmed, which are feelings that he typically explores by doing something incredibly dumb and risky.

He ain’t sure he can stand to do that right now either. Feels like he’s already done enough dumb and risky shit to last a lifetime - _two_ life times.

Arthur gets to his feet slowly, wincing as his poor old knees protest something fierce. He’s not as limber as he used to be back in the day, and he ain’t had a good tussle in more years than he can count.

“Here,” he says, awkwardly holding out a hand.

John looks at it, Arthur’s bloody and filthy palm, and then back up to meet his eyes. “I don’t get it,” he says. “You was always the one gettin’ on my case about how important family is. I left for one damn year, and you were harping on about it right up until the end.”

Arthur breaks their gaze and reaches down to haul John up. John lets him, staggering a little and using Arthur’s shoulder for support. His hand spasms as it clutches at Arthur’s shirt, and Arthur cannot tell for the life of him whether John’s fighting the impulse to punch or kiss him again.

“How old are you now, Morgan?” John asks. “You look’n like an old man again.”

“Shut your mouth, I’m only thirty-three.”

“Thirty-three,” John says, “and you never once looked for any of us.”

The accusation hurts like a bullet to the gut, which it really shouldn’t on account of it being the damn truth. Arthur steps away, stooping down to pick up his jacket. It’s exactly as filthy as he thought it would be, but Major gave it to him for Christmas and he’d never hear the end of it if he just left it out here to rot.

“Come on,” Arthur says, not meeting John’s eyes as he shrugs it back on and begins to lead the way out of the alley. John doesn’t move and Arthur turns, scowling, and snaps his fingers. “Well? Jesus, Marston - did death make you slow as well as stupid? Let’s get a move on.”

John returns his scowl but falls into step behind him. From the corner of his eyes, Arthur can see the bruised scrapes on his knuckles. He doesn’t mean to stare, but John catches him looking and awkwardly tucks his hands in his pockets.

Probably for the best. Neither of them needs temptation of any sort right now.

“Where are we headed?”

“My place,” Arthur says shortly. “You didn’t let me finish my beer and I think we’re both in the need of a strict drink.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have a lot of plans for this series, and the rest of this fic in particular is mostly written already. i know reincarnation is bit of a niche trope, so thank any of ya'll who took the time to read this, it means a great deal to me. 
> 
> twitter: @doingwritebyme  
> tumblr: glenflower


	2. Chapter 2

Arthur wakes to the sound of somebody pounding on his door. It takes his bleary mind a few solid moments to place the sound as knocking and not gunfire, but eventually it gets there.

Honestly, he thinks gunfire would have been less alarming. He’s been woken by it more times than he can possibly hope to count. He ain’t never had somebody on his doorstep at the crack of dawn before.

Suddenly, he remembers John asleep in the living room and Arthur scrambles out of bed so fast he nearly brains himself on the bedside table.

John is stirring on the sofa when he comes out, looking groggy and yet surprisingly tense. His tired eyes catch sight of Arthur and he lets loose a breath that seems to carry with it all the tension in his body. “Wa’s goin’ on?”

“Nothin’,” Arthur says, knocking lightly on the couch back as he passes by. “Go back to sleep, ugly.”

“Ain’t half as ugly as you,” John grunts, automatic and reflexive, but he obediently rolls over and by the time Arthur’s at the door he can hear the slow in-and-out of his sleepy breathing again.

Arthur hadn’t bothered putting on a shirt, so a blast of frigid winter air hits him full in the chest as he throws open the door. It’s still somehow less uncomfortable than seeing Major on his doorstep, arms folded and her expression completely unimpressed.

Sometimes, when she’s like this, she reminds him of Susan Grimshaw so fiercely that Arthur feels like he ought to start apologizing preemptively. Other times, he thinks she’s got more than a bit of Sadie in her too; that tough-edge sharpened to a knife’s precision by the cruelty of the world.

“Major,” he says, a little too loudly. He winces, chancing a glance over his shoulder, but John sleeps on, completely unaware.

“He’s in there, is he?” Major asks, not troubling herself in the least to keep her voice down. “Your mysterious bar visitor?”

“Shhh,” Arthur hisses, and then hurriedly steps onto the tiny spit of space past his doorstep, closing the door behind him. “He’s one grumpy bastard when you wake him up.”

“Well, you see, I wouldn’t know that,” Major says, faux cheerful. “On account of the fact I’ve never met him before. And you’ve never mentioned him before. Even though, going by what Steve and I saw last night, and you two seem to have quite the history.”

“Listen,” Arthur says awkwardly, but before he can get another word out, Major is pressing a sheaf of paper into his hands. Confused, he says, “What the -.”

“Would you just shut up and look at it, Arthur?”

Arthur does. And then he wishes he had not. “Major -.”

“Oh, come on,” she says, clearly exasperated and more than a little offended. “How stupid did you think I was, ‘Arthur Morgan’?”

It’s his name. Not his legal one, but his real one. It’s a print out from the Incarnate Registry, and Major has taken the time to circle his entry in thick red mark, adorned by crooked arrows pointing right at it.

_ Arthur Morgan - Arthur Collins  _

_ Born: 1863 _

_ Died: 1899  _

It’s probably the most incriminating document Arthur’s ever held in his life, and he once robbed trains on the regular. Without looking away, he crumples it into a ball and pitches it over the railing.

“Now,” Major says, “I bet if I had a name to look up for your boy, I’d probably find him on there too, wouldn’t I?”

“You had no right,” Arthur says, feeling hot with fury and embarrassment. “I ain’t -.”

“I don’t need your permission to do anything,” Major says, uncompromising. “If you didn’t want to tell us, that’s fine. But that’s a choice you make for yourself. I made this one for me. And I thought it was only fair that I told you.”

Arthur wants to stay mad, but the moral high ground is rapidly crumbling beneath him. With a sigh, he scrubs his hands over his face and asks, “Does Steve know?”

“I didn’t tell him. But you probably should. I didn’t agree to be your secret keeper.”

“Hell,” Arthur mutters. “It’s too early for this, Major.”

She looks completely unrepentant. “Some crazy guy assaults you in a bar, and then you disappear out back with him and never return. Did you think I was just going to sit around and twiddle my thumbs? You’re lucky I did this instead of filing a police report.”

“Yeah,” Arthur says. “I’m feel’n real lucky right now.”

Major looks him up and down. Arthur is incredibly conscious of the fact he’s only wearing an old pair of sweatpants and his nipples have probably gone perky in the cold. Trying not to be obvious about it, he discreetly folds his arms across his chest.

“I want to talk about this,” Major says. “When you’ve sorted whatever is going on with that stranger and you’re ready to stop being a coward, hit us up.”

Arthur doesn’t get a chance to reply. She turns around, disembarking the stairs without glancing back once. Arthur watches her go, still trying to get his sleepy mind to function fast enough to process whatever the fuck had just happened.

It doesn’t work. He still feels completely out of his depth. Giving up, he turns around and shoulders open the door, leaving behind the real world consequences for last night in the freshly fallen snow.

John is up, sitting on the sofa with a blanket over his shoulders and idly flicking through the sketchbook Arthur had made the mistake of leaving on the coffee table.

“Hey,” he snaps, but he’s too tired to really get angry over it. “Fuck, ain’t you ever heard of privacy, Marston?”

The look John gives him is dry enough to rival the bitterest of southern summers. “When did we ever have the luxury of privacy?”

“Yeah, well…” Arthur doesn’t have a rebuttal for that. He bypasses him, heading for the tiny four-by-four kitchen that’s barely large enough to contain what he needs to get by. “Coffee?”

“Yeah, alright,” John says. Arthur hears the sofa springs creak as he stands, but he focuses on dumping the coffee grounds into the mugs, and the hiss as the kettle boils. “Who was that before?”

“A friend,” Arthur says evasively. Out of spite, he puts sugar in John’s mug, even though he knows he never had a sweet tooth.

John snorts. “The one who was going to brain me with a bottle last night?”

“She probably wouldn’t have brained you,” Arthur says. “Can’t promise that she wouldn’t have tried though.”

When he turns around, John is leaning against the tiny square of bench space right by the battered fridge. Arthur does his best to seem like John hadn’t gotten the jump on him, and hands him his mug.

“Thanks,” John grunts, taking it. He nurses it in his hands, glancing around. “You live here?”

“What kinda question is that?” Arthur asks. “Yes, I live here, asshole.”

John makes a contemplative noise and takes a sip of his coffee. Immediately, his face scrunches up and he swirls the mug, squinting into it. Satisfied, Arthur says, “So, where was you before you came callin’ over here?”

“Around,” John says, which is incredibly informative. “Are we gonna talk about why you were hiding away like a coward yet?”

“Well, I was kinda hoping to wake up first,” Arthur says. It’s far too hot, but he chugs the rest of his coffee as quick as he can and slams the mug down on the bench. “I’m gonna take a shower. I smell worse than that alley floor we was rollin’ around on last night. Make yourself at home, I guess.”

Arthur beats a quick retreat to the bathroom, not glancing back. The lock’s been broken since he moved in, but the door closes at least, which is something. The room itself is nothing to write home about, just enough floor space that he doesn’t trip climbing in and out of the shower, but it gets the job done.

The taps squeal as he turns them on, and the hot water hisses furiously as it struggles to heat up. He can hear the heater hollering and clattering away, which is probably why he misses the fact that the door’s opened until he turns around to find John lounging by the sink.

“God _damn_ it, Marston,” he hisses, clutching at his chest. “Don’t you ever make any noise when you walk? And remember what I said about privacy?”

“You shy now?” John asks, sounding almost amused. “Took a hundred years to give Arthur Morgan some dignity, but it happened.”

“I ain’t shy,” Arthur grouses.

“Good, then you can share,” John says. “I was rollin’ on the street too. I ain’t smell any better than you.”

“Believe me, I know,” Arthur says, and then, because he doesn’t wanna be the one to back out, he says, “Well? Hurry up then, water’s runnin’ cold.”

It takes some work for the both of them to strip down without tripping over each other, but somehow they manage it. Strangely, it reminds Arthur of when they were both a lot younger, and not much brighter. Fighting for the prime bathing spot, washing off blood in whatever stream they passed by, bickering all the while.

It’s a miracle, Arthur thinks, that Dutch never shot them.

The shower isn’t really meant for two men of their size, but they’re long used to cramped spaces and a general lack of privacy. The taps dig into Arthur’s bruised back, and John nearly slips on the shower floor before Arthur reaches out to steady him with a hand to his naked hip.

“Still as clumsy as ever, I see,” Arthur says, and John elbows him ‘accidentally’ in the side as he reaches for the shampoo.

“I’ve seen you fall off your horse more times than I can count, I don’t think you really should be throwing stones here,” John says. Then, “Turn around?”

Arthur squints at him, making a concentrated effort not to let his eyes sink below the thin thatch of hair on John’s chest. “What?”

John makes an impatient gesture with the shampoo bottle. “You got water in your ears?”

“You wanna… wash my hair?” Arthur says skeptically.

“I wanna be clean,” John says. “And I’ve been to public bathrooms with more space than your damn shower.”

“You leave my apartment alone,” Arthur mutters, but obediently turns around. Despite that fact the both of them are as naked as they day there were born, Arthur hadn’t really felt exposed until he put his back to him. His spine crawls with the uncomfortable feeling of it and he snaps, “Sometime today, Marston.”

He hears the _click_ of the bottle opening and then a moment later John’s hands are in his hair, as rough and impatient as always. He pulls hard enough to make Arthur wince, but he knows better than to give John the satisfaction of saying anything.

He wonders for a moment when was the last time he ever had somebody wash his hair for him, and comes up blank. Not even Mary, he thinks. She’d been too proper for anything like that. If she’d known the frequency and casualness with which these kind of easy intimacies occasionally happened within the camp, he thinks she’d have been horrified.

“You don’t have to be so tense,” John says, startling Arthur out of his reverie. One of his hands slips down to Arthur’s neck. “I ain’t got no knife to stab you with.”

The idea of John Marston being capable of backstabbing anybody is so laughable that Arthur can’t help but snort. The hand John has on the back of his neck tightens.

“It ain’t that,” Arthur says. The trust between them has taken more than a few blows over their long and shared history, but Arthur has never for one second believed John capable of doing him hurt in any way that lasted. “You know it ain’t that.”

John doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then, “Turn around. Close your eyes and keep your head back. I’m gonna wash the soap out now.”

Arthur shuffles around, John’s hands guiding him. The slide of their slippery skin is somehow more intimate than the moment in the alley had been and Arthur hurries to close his eyes before he gets a good look at John’s face and says something that ruins the precarious truce of the moment.

Surprisingly, John’s hands are softer as they wash the suds from Arthur’s hair, guiding his head every which way he needs it and wiping away soap before it can hit his eyes. It’s on the tip of Arthur’s tongue to say something snarky about it, but the moment feels heavier than he has the courage to break.

“Alright,” John says after the longest eternity.

Arthur opens his eyes.

He’d known how near John would be, but somehow seeing his face right up close like this sends him momentarily reeling. It’s the strangest combination of nostalgia and unfamiliarity - he can recognize the faint scowl etched into the corners of his mouth, the focused flint of his eyes. He recognizes the way John looks at him, reacts to just being in the vicinity of one another.

He does not recognize the dark blue of his eyes. He does not recognize light brown of his hair. He does not recognize the smooth cheeks, the narrow jaw, the scarless skin.

For a second, Arthur is suddenly so dizzy with the confusion of it all that he forgets to breathe. It’s one thing, he thinks, to know who and where they are together and another thing entirely to understand it.

The world wobbles and he reaches out on instinct, hands tight on John’s hips as he struggles to right everything in the mixed up mess of his head.

“What’s wrong?” John asks.

“Fuck if I know,” Arthur wheezes.

John looks wryly amused. It does not help Arthur’s shaky legs in the least. “You always gotta make things so complicated,” John says, and then presses his hands to Arthur’s cheeks to hold him steady as he kisses him.

The water is beating down on his shoulders, and Arthur can still hear the shriek of the heater doing its damn best. His head feels a hundred years in the past, and John feels so incredibly present, and Arthur has never disassociated this hard in all of his damn lives. There’s no breath in his lungs, and John’s skin is slippery and smooth beneath his hands.

Arthur’s back hit the shower wall, and the glass rattles. John’s got one hand on his shoulder now, a leg tucked between Arthur’s. It’s all Arthur can do to kiss him back. He feels close to hyperventilating with it all, too much, _too_ real.

John goes to pull back, frowning, and Arthur abruptly realizes that he cannot possibly permit that. He hauls John back in, no subtlety in the slightest.

“You’re shaking,” John says, mouth rough against Arthur’s. “You got something to be afraid of that I don’t know about?”

There is nothing Arthur wants to talk about less than things he may or may not be afraid of. He slips down the wall a little, gets a hand in John’s hair, and yanks him close enough to mutter against his mouth, “For the love of god, do you ever shut _up_?”

Without skipping a beat, John says, “Maybe you should put in some more effort, old man.”

Arthur kisses him hard enough to split open the raw wound on his lip, noses knocking together. John hisses, doubtlessly feeling a fresh wave of pain, but Arthur doesn’t give him a chance to protest, throws himself into it with all the reckless enthusiasm that saw him through more than one set of bad decisions in his life.

They’re in the shower long enough that the water goes cold. Arthur can feel it like ice on every inch of his skin, but John’s on his knees in front of him, Arthur’s hands in his hair, and Arthur really couldn’t give a shit if the whole world came crashing down on top of them.

John digs his nails into the meat of Arthur’s thigh hard enough to draw blood, and Arthur comes _hard_. After, he jerks John off; vicious and rough, John’s back against the shower wall, pressed tightly together, and he feels it all over when John jerks and gasps, spilling in Arthur’s fist.

For a moment they stay like that, John panting hard against Arthur’s shoulder, the warmth of his breath aching against the frozen water. It’s been so long since Arthur’s had this - not just with John, but with _anyone_ \- that he wants to give in to the small, weak part of himself that begs to just stay like this, just for a moment longer, just while he works at putting his barriers back up.

Instead, he shrugs hard enough to dislodge John and says, “C’mon. We’re gonna catch our death if we stay in here.”

Arthur only has one clean towel so they both make a halfhearted attempt to dry off the worst of the water, and then troop back into the living area. Arthur finds a set of clothes for John, and miraculously John only complains the bare minimum. They’re shaky and freezing from the shower still, so Arthur digs out all the blankets he can find, and they pile them on the sofa, fighting for the spots with the least amount of broken springs.

It’s only after they’re settled in with John sleepily dozing on his shoulder that Arthur thinks to ask himself what the fuck they’re playing at here.

The problem, he thinks, is that it’s too easy to fall into this routine domesticity. Contrary to what a lot of folk seem to believe these days, living off the grace of the land in a commune of outlaws was more work than it seemed. After a while, you just… adjust to the easiness of the habits a campsite builds. He would have thought a hundred years might have broken them of the familiarity, but apparently not.

He should have known better. John Marston is not the kind of person content to be guided by the probabilities of the world.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Arthur warns, a little gruffer than he’d intended. “I know you like to laze about, but it’s not even noon.”

“I’m awake,” John says. He wrinkles his face and turns his head, rubbing his broken nose gently against Arthur’s shoulder to chase away some pained itch or another. “God, I forgot how much this hurt.”

“I’m happy to break your pretty-boy face anytime you need the reminder.”

John snorts. “That was always your nickname,” he says. “I swear, there wasn’t a single person the country over who didn’t look at you batting your eyelashes and at least think it.”

Arthur doesn’t dignify that with a response, a little because John’s isn’t exactly wrong. He’d hated it with a passion that defied explanation. Somehow, it’d followed him clear from one end of his life to the other - frankly ridiculous, he thinks, that people hadn’t stopped even when he was more crow’s feet and sun-weather skin than ‘pretty’ traditionally dictated.

A quiet falls between them. Arthur stares across the living room to the grimy window and tries not to be aware of John slouched against him like it’s his rightful place. It doesn’t work, especially not when John says, “We finally gonna talk yet? Or is there some more runnin’ you wanna do?”

Arthur sighs, closing his eyes for a second while he summons all his patience. “What’s there to say? You was right, and you know it. I never bothered looking for you - or anyone. What’s done is done.”

“If that was true we wouldn’t be sitting here,” John says, which is far wiser than Arthur would have expected from him. “It ain’t like you to turn your back on family, Arthur.”

Arthur grits his teeth. “Before the registry went public,” he says, “did you really think that I was alive? That any of us were alive?”

“I didn’t know nothin’,” John says. “That’s why -.”

“Did you really believe deep down,” Arthur says, “that if you looked for us, you’d find anybody?”

“I still looked,” John says. “Day I turned eighteen and they let me register, I looked, Arthur. And I ain’t find anybody, despite the fact you was always old enough to be in there. That’s more than you did.”

“You ain’t stupid, John Marston, even if sometimes I reckon you work hard at seeming it.”

“ _Hey -”_

“The fact that we both got spit out again like this is incredible. The odds...” Arthur forcibly wretches himself back to the point. “I knew that if I looked, I wouldn’t find anybody - but so long as I didn’t look, I didn’t know, and that meant there was a chance.”

John squints at him, the curling strands of his hair falling in his face. He’s red-cheeked from the suffocating warmth of the blankets, and his nose is a livid blue-and-green that makes him look awful. “So you thought not knowing if anybody was about was better than knowing for a fact they wasn’t?”

Arthur rubs at his jaw a little, self-conscious. He’s never had to actually talk about this before - and hearing it aloud doesn’t sound any less stupid than it had in his head. “No - well, yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

If he’d thought John would be impressed by his reasoning, he’s incredibly disappointed. John frowns, pulling back. He can feel the cold, yawning space opening up between them. “So you was too yellow-bellied to even look? That’s your big grand explanation?”

Arthur watches as John pulls away, the blanket falling from his shoulders as the rage rises in his expression. John’s temper has always been more hair-trigger than he lets on, and Arthur has always been particularly talented at being the one to set it off.

“Marston -.”

“I’d expect a lot of things from you, Arthur Morgan,” John says, staggering off the sofa, getting caught up in the blanket in his rush. “But cowardice ain’t one of them.”

John rounds the sofa, vanishing in the vague direction of the exit. “Hey, _hey_.” By the time Arthur manages to untangle himself and give chase, John is stealing one of his good coats from by the door. “Hold up just a goddamn minute, would you?”

The look of sheer ire John shoots him cannot be contained to words. “You’ve had two lifetimes of minutes, Morgan. Ain’t seem like you got much need for one more.”

Despite his best effort to keep a level head, Arthur feels the injustice of the situation stoking the carefully banked embers of his constant low-level irritation. “That ain’t fair and you know it,” he snaps, hand clutching furiously at the back of the sofa. “I didn’t see much talkin’ out of you that first go round.”

“Wasn’t much to say,” John replies. “You made sure of that.”

Before Arthur can come up with something wittier than ‘well fuck you too’ John is out the door, slipping into the crisp, early-morning air, taking care to slam it closed behind him.

Arthur stays where is he, staring at the peeling paint and chipped door handle. A part of him can’t understand how it all escalated so quickly, but another larger part understands just fine.

John had been right on that front - hypocrisy is probably a greater sin than most when it comes to their gang, and Arthur has strung people up over lesser crimes, that’s for sure. Arthur had known from the start that the justifications for his choice stood on shaky ground, and he shouldn’t be surprised to feel it giving out underneath him.

He’s not going to give chase. If John wants to go storming in and out of his life like a horse in a fine snit, let him. Arthur has better things to worry about than John fucking Marston.

.

Arthur sleeps roughly that night. He’s too agitated, riled up like nothing else. His dreams are a confused mess, caught between two entirely different centuries. Every single one of them are about John. Too clearly, Arthur sees him sitting at the campfire, stripped down to his undershirt and trousers, eyes bright in the firelight and looking straight at him.

When he wakes up, he’s miserable. This in and of itself isn’t too surprising, because Arthur has spent most of his life miserable, but it’s not a feeling that improves with repetition. For a moment, he lays in bed staring up at the ceiling, sorting through the mess that had been yesterday and the night before, testing the hazy edges of his recollection.

It feels strange to consider that it hadn’t all just been one very vivid hallucination. It wouldn’t be the first time Arthur’s gotten reality and imagination mixed up when it comes to John. Once, when he was a far younger man than he is now, he spent a good six months or so on the longest bender in either of his lives.

He remembers how the past and the present seemed to trip and tangle together until he couldn’t pick them apart if he wanted to. He hadn’t, of course. At the time it was as close as he was ever going to get to John - to any of the others he’d left behind. Eventually, he’d cleaned up his act, dragged himself beaten and humiliated from the gutter, but the aching ghost of it all had followed him for long after that.

When he stumbles out to the living area, there little signs of John still remain. His half-drunk coffee on the counter, the blanket haphazardly tossed over the back of the sofa, the missing coat by the door. Reminders that it’d all been real - that John was _here_.

Arthur cleans up slowly. He thinks all the while, as he touches the things where John’s presence lingers, about what the ever loving _fuck_ he’s supposed to down now.

John hadn’t left a number or an address. Hadn’t spoken to Arthur about his new life at all, now that Arthur thinks about it. The both of them had been far too caught up in the past, which clings like a sticky web, and Arthur thinks it’d take stronger men than either of them to fight its insidious pull.

Logically, he knows, he could look him up. He doesn’t know exactly how John tracked him down, but all it’d take was one button press on the registry to let John know that he was looking. He can’t change the past, but he can extend a peace offering for what little it's worth.

Arthur picks up his phone, thumb passing idly over the screen.

John had been so _angry_. Even in the small quiet moments where the intimacy of their reunion had outweighed the bitter hurt of their grudges, it’d been there, lingering on the edges of their every interaction, threatening to tip it all over a cliff’s edge at a moment’s notice.

Would John even _want_ to hear from him? Did Arthur even care what John wanted?

_Fuck_ , Arthur thinks, and pitches his phone across the room, hearing the faint clatter as it hits the wall.

He showers at light speed, not permitting himself to get distracted by the towel tossed over the sink, John’s clothes still crunched up beside the toilet. He’s brief, in and out in a minute flat. He dresses just as quickly and tucks his wallet in his back pocket.

Arthur glances at his phone laying lonely and abandoned on the living room floor and after no longer than second of hesitation, chooses to leave it behind.

The walk is not necessarily a short one, but he’d been hoping it would clear his head. It does not.

Major opens her door on the first knock. It’s barely past eight in the morning, but she looks remarkably put together despite her pajamas, coffee in hand, and hair freshly washed and tied out of the way. She looks incredibly surprised to see him on her doorstep.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” she says. “Do you know what time it is?”

Arthur shoulders past her, not waiting for an invitation. “You wanted to talk,” he says gruffly. “This is your chance.”

Major pauses for a second before she closes the door, the gentle click of it yet another juxtaposition to the horrible slamming John had left him with last night. “Not that I want to discourage you,” she says, “but what brought this on?”

Arthur heads for the kitchen, kicking out a chair at the tiny formica dining table that sits in the cramped corner. “I have decided that secret keeping is not my strong suit,” he says. “I’m tired of it, Major. Let’s just get it all over with at once.”

Major does not look convinced but she doesn’t argue. This is why Arthur loves her, honestly. Major never presumes to know what’s the best for him or anybody else, takes them at their word even if they perhaps haven’t earned the right. “I'll call Steve,” she says, and disappears back out into the hallway.

Arthur does not follow. He sits at the table and stares at the floor with such fixed devotion that his head starts to pound. His heart is galloping a mile an hour in his chest, and the effort of keeping his breath even is wearing at him.

Arthur was never made for the weight of secret keeping. Even Dutch, for all his faults, had known that. Arthur does not do well with anything less than a complete truth - is too prone to burying himself alive if left alone with a shovel and a grave that needs digging.

When Major returns, she’s dressed for the day and has two bottles of beer in her hand. She wordlessly passes one to Arthur and he takes it gratefully as she sits down across from him. He drinks it all in five minutes flat, and Major passes him her half-finished bottle too.

Eventually, after what feels far longer than Arthur reasonably knows it is, he hears the front door open and Steve call out, “Hello?”

“In the kitchen,” Major hollers.

Steve appears in the doorway. Immediately, he takes in the empty bottles by Arthur’s elbow with cautious curiosity. “We turning into morning drinkers now?” he asks as he hangs his coat up on the skinny hook beside the fridge. “What’s the occasion?”

“Have a seat,” Major says, kicking the one beside her out in welcome. “Arthur’s about to give us a confessional.”

Steve sits down, looking incredibly ill at ease. Annoyed, Arthur snaps, “Jesus, I ain’t gonna do anything stupid, stop looking at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything!” Steve protests. “I’m just… concerned.”

Arthur opens mouth to snark back and Major shoots him a sharp look. “I think,” she says, “that both of us are entitled to a little concern at this point.”

Reluctantly, Arthur bites back the nasty curse on the tip of his tongue. “I know,” he says. “I just…” With a frustrated grunt he runs his hands through his hair. “None of us are gonna like this conversation,” he warns. “I ain’t gonna sugar coat it for either of you.”

“We haven’t asked you to,” Major says.

“Sugar coat _what_?” Steve asks, exasperated.

“I’m an Incarnate, Steve,” Arthur says with the last of his waning patience. “I ain’t been particularly subtle about it.”

Steve looks at him blankly for a moment. He opens his mouth, thinks, and then closes it. Arthur might have shocked him less if he announced his intention to give up all worldly desires and retire to the ocean.

After a long, stretching second, Steve turns to Major. “Did you know?”

“I only found out the other night,” she says. “After that guy accosted us at the bar, I looked it up. It wasn’t a hard leap of logic, Steve.”

Steve looks like he disagrees intensely. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I… congratulations?” he shrugs awkwardly. “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to say, man. I don’t think I’ve ever met an Incarnate before.”

Arthur picks up one of the bottles, shaking it. Disappointingly, only dregs swirl at the bottom. “I don’t wanna talk about it,” he says. “But I like keeping secrets even less.”

“Given the amount you seem to be holding close to your chest at any given time, one might disagree with you on that,” Major says, absolutely merciless. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say you were a true old-western cowboy.”

Despite himself, that pulls a tight smile from Arthur. “Well,” he drawls. “I guess that’s one word for it.”

“Well, what’s another?” Steve asks.

“I got called an outlaw more than once,” Arthur says. He’d decided on the way over here that he was going all in. If he was going to sabotage his life, let him do it all at once. “A wanted man in more states that you can probably count. These days, I reckon you might consider me and mine guilty of mass murderer. I put more men in the ground than your average undertaker.”

“Wait,” Steve says, holding up a hand. “Hold on - are you saying you…” his voice drops to little more than a whisper. “ _Killed_ someone?”

“Many someones,” Arthur says without blinking. His fingers itch for a smoke. “Most of them were bad men, but some of them weren’t. Don’t ask me to tell you how many, because I probably can’t count that high.”

Major’s hands are ashen grey around her mug. “You realize that there are some people out there who think that Incarnates ought to be held accountable for their past crimes?”

“Yeah,” Arthur says. “I’m one of them.” He holds his hands up and surprises himself by keeping them steady. “You think a hundred years is enough to make me an innocent man again? I know what I did, and I know why I did it. If you put me back there, I’d do it all over again exactly the same.”

The silence that settles in the kitchen is as heavy as a funeral shroud. Clearly, nobody wants to be the one to break it. Arthur can’t blame them. He doesn’t know what he’d do if he were in their shoes either.

Back in the golden days, casual murder was just the way things were done. The first time Arthur killed a man, it was over a pickpocketing attempt gone wrong. He’d panicked, and the next thing he knew the knife in his hand had been sprouting out of a man’s belly. It’d seemed like the end of the world for all of two days, and then the law hadn’t come for him and less than a week later he killed his second man.

It got easier after that.

Arthur had probably filled entire cemeteries. He hadn’t been proud of it then, and he ain’t proud of it now, but sometimes the opposite of pride isn’t shame - it’s just apathy. A tired, reluctant apathy.

He’d done what he had to do to survive, and to protect the people in his life he thinks deserved that from him. If folks these days thought he should be strung up for that, then so be it. He don’t entirely disagree.

“I don’t know what to say,” Major admits after the silence has stretched long enough to crack in the middle. “I - I thought that maybe you’d done somethings in your past that was probably a little to the left of the moral line, but…”

“Yeah,” Arthur says, with a grin that shows all his teeth. “There’s ‘morally grey’ and then there’s ‘cold blooded murder’.”

Major’s grip on her coffee tightens again. Arthur’s seen stone easier to read than her expression right now. “I’m a doctor, Arthur,” she says. “I’m in the business of saving every life that comes through my door, regardless of whether I think the world’s made better for it. What you’re talking about is kind of the exact opposite of what I do.”

“Well, I ain’t shot somebody in at least a hundred and something years,” Arthur says in a poor attempt for levity.

“I think,” Steve says, surprising Arthur with the quiet suddenness of his voice, “that I’m going to need time to process this.” He doesn’t meet Arthur’s eyes. His hands are knotted in his lap, and they’re trembling ever so slightly under the pressure of Arthur’s gaze. “This is… this is kind of a lot, man. This is deep shit.”

Arthur glances to Major. She does meet his eye, but she doesn’t say anything. Her mouth is a thin line.

Arthur is not surprised. He won’t permit himself to be. When he’d made the choice, he knew that this was the most likely outcome. While he couldn’t be prosecuted for any crimes he’d committed before he was reincarnated, that didn’t expunge the fact he’d committed them.

What he feels isn’t misery or exhaustion - it’s anger. Pure and unfettered, boiling furiously in his gut and lighting all his nerves up like a firework.

“Should have expected this from you,” Arthur says, shoving his chair back loudly and getting to his feet. “It’s all fun and games - talking about me bein’ a cowboy and ridin’ in the west - until you gotta acknowledge that life wasn’t so kind back then.”

“Arthur -.”

“So you lot can judge me all you want, I ain’t begrudge you that, but when you do, think about the fact that you ain’t ever have to worry about gettin’ your throat slit in your sleep, or waking up to find goddamn Pinkertons ambushed your camp while you weren’t awake to stop them. That you ain’t ever been chased outta town because you had to break somebody’s neck after they tried to gut you in a bar fight, or seen half your family gunned down in front of you.”

This time, nobody calls his name. Neither of them will even look at him. They’re both still as a statue, staring at the scratched tabletop, shoulders hunched and spines stiff. It takes Arthur a solid second, but then it clicks; they’re _afraid_ of him.

And, just like that, the fury drains out of him, leaving nothing behind but cold, sweaty shakes and an uncertain feeling blooming in the empty space of his gut.

“Aw, hell,” Arthur says, and he flees the kitchen without a backwards glance, nearly kicking the door clean off its hinges in his rush to leave.

Outside offers him clear skies and fresh air, and Arthur walks eleven blocks without pause, trying to work through the fog clouding his mind, blocking all rational thought. By the time he allows himself to slow to a stop, he’s thinking of one thing and one thing only:

Pack a bag. _Go_.

It wouldn’t be the first time he did it. Wouldn’t even be fucking close. Arthur’s whole life has been an endless line of running from things that threaten to drag him down deeper than he has the strength to crawl back from.

He’s earned that right, he thinks. He stayed with Dutch until the very end, even when everything had started to fall down around them. He’d stuck it out, both feet firmly on the crumbling cliff point, until it’d been the literal death of him.

He doesn’t want to do that again. He doesn’t think he has it in him.

By the time he makes it back to his apartment he’s still a mess of conflicting thoughts and feelings and he struggles to get the right key in the lock. The apartment is just as he left it, and for some reason that really hits Arthur hard.

You’d think after sixty-odd cumulative years of turmoil, he’d come to understand that the waking world does not often reflect the realities of his mind, but it’s a lesson that refuses to stick.

His phone is still on the floor, but Arthur bypasses it without looking, heading straight to the kitchen sink where he splashes water on his sweaty face, rubbing a cool hand along the back of his hot neck.

The shock of the water helps with the furious, mindless heat a little, but only a little. His every thought is still chaotic, firing off in all directions, half making plans to be over the border by midnight, and half caught up in how he might go about begging forgiveness from those he’s hurt.

Mostly though, Arthur realizes he’s just too tired to do anything at all. He’s been away for an hour or two at most, and already that feels long enough. He needs - he needs _silence_. He needs to be alone in his own head, without ghosts chasing him around every corner. He needs more clarity than he can give right now.

Arthur’s bed seems a long way off and the sofa is very near. When he curls up on the sinking cushions, he can smell the faint remnants of a cologne that definitely does not belong to him and the grease of a bar alley. The blanket he’d given John is crumpled terribly, and Arthur tucks it around himself, not allowing himself to think about John’s own hands passing over the fabric.

Sleep does not come easily, but Arthur is long versed in squeezing in whatever rest he can manage when he needs it, and eventually his overwrought exhausted mind gives up, and he passes into blissful unconsciousness, tense and miserable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for the incredible comments. I did not foresee people enjoying it as much as they apparently have. Reading through them and seeing ya'll excited and invested in this au really means the absolute world to me. I can't wait to share more of this universe with you!! (I also promise that while things are always gonna be a little sad and angsty at points given ... canon. That this is intended as a story of reconciliation and second chances.) 
> 
> tumblr: glenflower  
> twitter: @doingwritebyme


	3. Chapter 3

For the first time in his life since his reincarnation, Arthur dreams of the stag.

It’s by the river west of Valentine, drinking peacefully at the banks. Arthur is aware that he himself is there, but he’s an observer, not a participant. The sun is sinking rapidly behind the New Hanover hills, and clouds whip past it furiously.

The stag calmly looks up and blinks at him with its dark eyes. While the rest of the landscape is rushing by fast enough to make him dizzy, the stag seems unmoved - it seems _real_.

Arthur wakes gasping with black eyes and a bloodred skyline in his head. He rolls over and off the couch in a rush, staggering drunkenly as he tries to get his bearings, colliding briefly with the coffee table before he manages to get his feet under him.

Arthur stands in the middle of his living room, heart pounding in his chest and head slowly clearing of fog. Through the windows he can see the beginnings of dusk settling. He’d slept away most of the day and hadn’t even noticed.

He breathes out slowly, presses one hand to his galloping chest, and slowly turns to observe his apartment.

It’s still the same old shithole. He’s still him. There’s no stag, no bloody sunset, no John - it’s just Arthur and the mess he’s made for himself.

“Shit,” he says. And then, louder, “ _Fuck_.”

It is not the first time he’s catapulted awake with such a sense of urgency, but it’s been a while, and Arthur had forgotten the intensity of it. Already, the details of the dream are fading from his mind, but the feeling does not.

Arthur has never claimed to be well versed in the pseudo-science of prophecy, but even he can recognize a hint when he sees it.

Gently, he picks the blanket up from the ground and folds it neatly over the back of the couch. He can see the creases in the worn cushions from where he’d been twisting in his sleep, and the whole room stinks of stale, panicked sweat. Arthur graciously does not allow himself to be embarrassed about it.

His phone is still where he left it half buried in the carpet and it’s nothing short of a miracle that the screen hadn’t smashed. Arthur doesn’t own a computer. This right here is his one lifeline.

He’s never actually visited the official Incarnate Registry before, and as it sluggishly boots up he’s a little overwhelmed by all the information offered, the myriad of links, the resources and websites stacked in the sidebar.

Objectively, he knows being an Incarnate is the kind of phenomena that lends itself to intense documentation and fanatic obsession. Personally, he’s done he’s best not to think about it too much, because sometimes the reality of his situation seems a little too great to bear.

John’s name stares back at him from the screen. Arthur has stood in front of a speeding train, but somehow clicking the little ‘REQUEST CONTACT’ button is the hardest thing he’s ever fucking done.

He does it though. Somehow, he fucking does it.

It’s anticlimactic. A loading screen whirls for a moment, and then it morphs into a bright check mark. And then nothing.

Nothing to do but wait.

.

Arthur can barely stand to be away from his phone.

The sun has long since set, and he spends the night cleaning his apartment. Rinsing out John’s mug in the kitchen, folding his left-over clothes and setting them aside on the tiny bathroom vanity. The thought of John out there in Arthur’s cast-offs is distracting, and he does not allow himself to focus on it too much.

Once he runs out of things to stress clean, he checks his phone again. No response.

Decided, he breaks out the bleach and makes the half-crazed impromptu choice to scrub out the bathroom. Surprisingly, it helps. The chemicals fry his brain a little, and the effort of stripping of his bright pink rubber gloves to check for a message he knows isn’t waiting for him is more tedious than he can stand right now.

John will either see his request or he won’t. John will either respond or he won’t. Either way, it’s out of Arthur’s hands. John had not left him a number to contact him on, and even if Arthur tried his level best to hunt him down, he probably wouldn’t succeed.

The world has changed, but the Van der Linde boys have not - they know how to run like other people know how to breathe, and Arthur was the one who taught John how.

He finishes up at just past three in the morning. His bathroom has never looked so clean. Arthur smells like a goddamn hospital.

His message bank is still empty.

_Give him time_ , Arthur thinks. _You owe him that much, at least_.

Arthur strips of his gloves and then his shirt too, because he’d spilled what feels like half the goddamn bleach on it and he’s already got a headache the size of Texas. John’s clothes are still sitting precisely where he left them beside the sink, neatly folded despite being in dire need of a wash.

Arthur hesitates. It’s a bad idea, he knows it, but Arthur is a connoisseur of bad ideas. He puts on John’s shirt. It smells a little like dirt and a lot like cigarette smoke and alcohol, which is more comforting than Arthur knows it strictly should be. It’s tight in the shoulders, but it fits, and he does not permit himself to second guess the decision once it’s been made.

He plucks his cigarettes off the coffee table as he passes by, and steps outside into the brisk midnight air.

There’s a tiny spit of a walkway outside of his apartment, and Arthur settles himself against the fencing of it, looking out at the cluttered city street and the pools of the sidewalk lights turning the dusty asphalt black.

His light takes three tries to catch, but the clarity of the first breath of his cigarette is worth it. He breathes the smoke out, watching it fog in the air, and closes his eyes.

Sometimes, when it’s quiet like this and he has nothing but the taste of cheap tobacco and frigid winter air, he can almost forget that he’s not supposed to be here at all. He can pretend that there’s an entire campsite behind his back, and if he turns around he’ll find Uncle passed out by the fire, Miss Grimshaw whistling quietly as she works on mending the latest shirt to fall casualty to bullet fire. Jack asleep in Abigail’s lap, and John staring out over the water beside them with crappy coffee in his hands and unfathomable distance in his eyes.

Arthur doesn’t know how he’s ever supposed to stop missing that. Sometimes, it hits him like a gut punch and it’s all he can do to remember how to breathe around the pain.

Arthur has lost a lot of things in his life. His mother, when he was far too young. Then John before he even got the chance to have him. Jenny, Davy, Mac. Then all at once everybody - Sean, Kieran, Lenny, Hosea.

Dutch.

Now, probably Major and Steve.

John again.

Arthur wonders if it’s cyclical. If he’s just meant to lose everybody he ever dares attempt to keep. Doesn’t seem to matter if he clings tight enough than he can feel his bones ache, or if he gives them the space to make the choice on their own - everybody goes, and Arthur is left alone.

He feels something brush his shoulders and he opens his eyes. For a second, he thinks he’s watching ash from the campfire flicker by, and then reality rights itself and he realizes it’s snow. Grimacing, he glances up, cigarette in his teeth.

It’s pretty, he supposes. Reminds him of the Grizzlies. Some days that’s a feeling he ain’t comfortable indulging. Some days it’s a good one.

Makes him think of John. The dumb idiot trapped in the mountains by wolves of all things; the look of genuine relief when Arthur had found him out on that ledge half clawed to pieces and just about blue.

Arthur smiles without meaning to, tapping ash off the end of his cigarette, and then somebody behind him says, “What you got to smile about, Morgan?”

Arthur whips around so quickly he just about sprains his back. The snow had muffled the sound of him climbing the stairs, but John is there, hands in the pocket of the coat he’d stolen from Arthur as he hops up the last step to Arthur’s apartment.

He looks… bruised. He hadn’t bandaged up his broken nose, and there’s something so nostalgic about the obvious crooked hint to it. There’s a cut on his cheek not far from where Arthur remembers his scars running.

Arthur points at it with the diminishing remains of his cigarette. “Now, I know I didn’t give you that.”

John shrugs. He comes closer, leaning his back against the railing beside him. “Got into a fight,” he says, far too casually. Now that’s he’s near, Arthur can see the fragile line of his shoulders, the tension winding him taunt. “Still don’t look as bad as you though.”

Arthur doesn’t really know what to say. He chances a glance at John from the corner of his eye, but even a glimpse of the crooked lines of his profile is more than he can handle right now. He looks away. He clears his throat and says, “You got my message?”

“It was basically a glorified friend request, gotta have words for it to be a message,” John says. “But yeah. I saw.”

“Wasn’t like I had any other way to contact you,” Arthur says gruffly. “I’m doin’ the best I can here, John.”

John is quiet for a moment so long that it stretches from awkward to uncomfortable. Arthur flicks the last of his cigarette over the railing and finds the strength to look up.

John is studying him silently, eyes dark and unreadable. Arthur thinks he can recognize the frown on his face, even if it looks out of place against all the unfamiliar changes in it. John Marston has never been a quiet man prone to deep thoughts, and it unsettles Arthur fiercely to see him like this.

“What?” Arthur says, throat tight. “If you got something you wanna -.”

“If this is your best,” John says, “I don’t want it, Arthur.”

Arthur goes abruptly quiet. He doesn’t know what to say.

John takes in a tight breath and then lets it out slowly. “Look,” he says, “things went… they went bad last time. We all know that. But you and me? That was never nothin’ good. Neither of us ever even _tried_.”

“There wasn’t anything to try for,” Arthur says sharply. “You had -.”

“Abigail and Jack,” John cuts him off again, annoyed. “I know, Arthur. I must have heard you say it about a thousand times, I reckon. And yeah, maybe that put a stop to anything before it really got going, but I don’t have Abigail and Jack now, and if you pull the same shit on me this time as you did before, I swear to god I’m gonna make you wish the universe had never spat you back out again at all.”

Arthur cannot help the broad smile he gives to that. “Too late,” he says. “I already do.”

John’s scowl is a thing to behold. He steps closer, forcing himself into Arthur’s space and making him to turn around and put his back to the railing. “God, enough with this pity party already, Morgan. We saw some shit, but we’re here now. This is a goddamn second chance, and it seems you’re doing your best to piss it all away.”

John’s not quite shouting, but his voice is louder than it really should be at this hour in a crowded residential complex, but Arthur really does not give a damn. He can feel an age-old anger that has been slumbering for a hundred years beginning to wake, and he clutches at the railing beneath his hands tightly to keep from throwing another punch he doesn’t think John is really in the condition to take.

“What do you want from me here, John?”

“Better than you’re giving,” John says, whip quick. His hands come up, and Arthur expects violence, but they’re surprisingly gentle as they fist in the front of his shirt. He pulls slightly, shaking Arthur like he can jar loose the tight misery that has been lodged deep in his gut for longer than he’s been alive. “I’ve seen your best, Arthur Morgan, and I don’t want it. Give me something better than that.”

Arthur’s mouth is painfully dry. Honestly, he says, “I don’t know if I can.”

“I seen you do a whole lotta things harder than that,” John says. “Stop being difficult.”

John kisses him. The warmth of his mouth is a shock against the cold night, and Arthur can’t help but push into it, hands already sliding up John’s chest. “Ain’t being difficult,” he mutters. “You’re just not thinkin’ long game here.”

“You’re thinkin’ too much,” John counters. “Same old, I guess.” He steps back from the railing, backing up to the door and dragging Arthur with him. “Shut up, for a change, will you?”

They slip into the apartment, and Arthur barely remembers to lock the door behind them, John’s hands a distraction. “You stayin’ the night?”

“I’m not sleepin’ on the couch,” John says instantly, a glimmer in his eyes.

“I wasn’t plannin’ on it,” Arthur says.

His bed is in the same disarray he’d left it in the previous morning, and Arthur stumbles on the sheets strewn across the floor. John doesn’t miss a beat as he uses the momentum to tumble them to the bed, Arthur with his back flat on the mattress and John looming above him.

It occurs to Arthur as John leans down to kiss him that he doesn’t think they’ve ever actually had sex in a bed before. The few hotels they’d ever stayed in had walls too thin to risk it, and any beds at a camp went to the women and children first. Mostly, when they’d fucked Arthur remembers it being messy, tucked away in the trees or awkward one-night camps.

They hadn’t gotten to do a lot of things, he thinks.

“Are you…” John leans back, sitting on his heels and skating his hands up under Arthur’s shirt. “Is this mine?”

“Took you goddamn long enough,” Arthur says.

“I was distracted,” John says, and he certainly seems it now, watching the shape of his hands beneath the fabric with avid fascination. He scratches his fingers down Arthur’s skin. “Damn.”

John sounds so honestly appreciative that Arthur almost doesn’t know how to respond. He’s never done well with even the barest hint of a compliment anywhere, let alone in bed, and especially not from John.

“It’s just a shirt,” Arthur says. “Are you gonna take it off or what?”

There’s a hint of something dark in John’s expression. “Nah,” he says, slipping his hands out from beneath it and catching his fingers on Arthur’s waistband instead. “I think it’s fine where it is.”

“Are you serious? Hey, _Marston_.”

John’s not listening to him anymore, busy unbuckling Arthur’s jeans. He gives a bossy tug and Arthur obediently lifts his hips. His jeans land in a crumpled heap on the floor, John palming Arthur’s thighs appreciatively and with a possessive familiarity that should feel out of place given how long it’s been since they’ve done this.

It occurs to Arthur then that they _haven’t_ done this - not like this, not in their current bodies. His skin has never felt John’s touch, and the thrill of the newness of it all sends a hiss slipping out from between his teeth.

“How you wanna do this?” John asks. He’s leaning over Arthur, one hand planted on the bed beside him and the other greedily sliding up the inside of his thigh. His knuckles brush the erection Arthur’s rapidly pitching and it takes all Arthur’s limited willpower not to push into it. “ _Do_ you wanna do this?”

“Well, fuck, Marston. I sure didn’t let you strip me down in my bedroom so we could play a goddamn round of checkers.”

John laughs roughly. “You know what I mean,” he says. “What do you want here, Arthur?”

Arthur does not like to think about all the things he may want from John Marston. “I reckon I can take whatever you got to give,” he says.

John shuffles in closer between the spread of Arthur’s legs. His rakes up the stupid shirt he’s refusing to take off, stroking his hands down Arthur’s chest. “Reckon I wanna fuck you,” he says, voice uneven. Suddenly, the room feels incredibly devoid of air. “That something you might want too?”

Arthur wants it so bad it feels like a physical ache. He’s dizzy with the mere thought of it. John’s looming above him, hair hanging in his face, but hands still on Arthur’s skin, waiting for permission.

Working incredibly hard to keep his voice steady, Arthur says, “Yeah. Yeah I reckon I might.”

John smiles, and Arthur remembers that exact expression shared over a dozen campfires and corpses. Sharp teeth and a sharper look in his eyes - the kind of expression that a dozen dime store novels try to capture and never quite nail.

It’s been an incredibly long time since Arthur has so much as had a one-night stand, and it’s a bigger relief than he’ll admit out loud when the condoms in his drawer aren’t actually expired. John generously does not comment on the mostly full bottle of lube, but that could just be because he’s busy opening Arthur up with such obsessive precision that he barely notices at all.

“Remember how this used to be?” John asks, like Arthur’s capable of remembering anything at all with two of John’s fingers inside of him. John’s presses a laugh into Arthur’s collarbone. “We bought that oil from that guy in Blackwater and he refused to tell us what was in it.”

“Fuck,” Arthur says, digging his nails into John’s back. “Smelled like shit, too.”

“These days you can get lube on any goddamn street corner and a hundred damn flavours. People really don’t know how good they have it.” He twists his fingers and Arthur’s breath momentarily leaves him. “You doin’ okay?”

“Don’t you ever shut up?” Arthur marvels, kicking his heel into the back of John’s thigh. “I swear you didn’t used to talk this much during sex.”

John’s lips graze the hollow of his throat. “Probably was too nervous,” he says. “Seein’ you naked has that effect on a guy, Morgan.”

Arthur’s nerves are a livewire, but he can’t help but let out a strained laugh even as feels sweat beading in the small of his back. “You ain’t nervous now?”

“Nah,” John says, and his fingers finally slip loose. Arthur sucks in a breath while he has the room for it. “Feels like this has been a long damn time coming.”

“It’s gonna be the only thing coming the rate you’re going at.”

“Alright, alright,” John says, smoothing his hand down Arthur thigh again like he’s a startled horse. Out of all the people Arthur’s slept with over both lifetimes, John’s always been among the most genuinely tactically - seemingly reluctant to grant even a moment of space between them.

Once, Arthur probably would have minded. Those days are long gone, if they were at all.

John pushes in slowly, hands on Arthur’s waist, thumbs rubbing soothing circles in his skin. Arthur wants to snap at him to hurry up, but truthfully he appreciates the gentleness. He doesn’t get it often, and the care with which John thoughtlessly gives in moments like this when Arthur is feeling brittle and defensive is enough to ease the prickly shame that sometimes eats at him.

“Yeah?” John asks. Arthur is gratified to hear the minute catch in his voice.

“I’m fine,” Arthur grunts. He takes a deep breath, holds it, and lets it out again. “You can move.”

John doesn’t ask him if he’s sure; at least he remembers how well Arthur typically responds to that. His first thrust is shallow, but it’s still enough to tense Arthur up something fierce. Doesn’t matter that this ain’t his first time, the sensation is always alien. Doesn’t help that the people Arthur has trusted enough to do this with are few and far between, and the rawness of that feeling amplifies everything so intensely.

John goes to pause, but Arthur reaches up, sinking his fingers hard into John’s wrist. “Keep going.”

John does. Slow first, and then quicker when Arthur tentatively moves with him. It takes a moment to rediscover it after so long apart, but they stumble into their rhythm eventually, and after that everything else slips away.

The heat in Arthur’s gut is fierce, and the warmth of John’s hands on his skin creates a feedback loop between them that leaves him gasping and sweaty. John skates a hand under Arthur’s shirt, and gives a grin.

“What?” Arthur gasps. “You lookin’ real damn smug there, Marston.”

“Good view,” John says, and the nonchalant tone is ruined by the breathlessness in his voice. He snaps his hips forward and Arthur’s hands fly to grab at the sheets as he feels the tension in the pit of his stomach.

“I know I look ridiculous,” Arthur says, incredibly aware of the fact he’s hard and naked except for John’s stupid shirt. “Can I take this damn thing off yet?”

“Leave it,” John says sharply, and before Arthur can argue he gives another hard thrust and it’s all Arthur can do to keep from saying anything at all.

The world wavers around him. He can hear the harsh pant of their breaths and the distant sound of early-commuter traffic. The street lights outside his window are leaving puddles of light over his room and casting John’s sharp features in grim shadows.

Once again, Arthur experiences an out of body experience so intense that he nearly comes right then and there.

He’s here and he’s not - he’s with John and he’s not. Both things are true, and the parallel of them makes his head spin.

A hand soothes through his sweaty hair, startling him. “You with me?”

“Yeah,” Arthur chokes out. “Yeah, right here.”

Arthur comes first - John’s hands tight on his thighs and the unmatchable intimacy of John fucking him through one of the hardest orgasms of his life. It seems to go for an age, tumbling down a cliff’s edge of pleasure so keen it borders on agony. He’s reasonably sure he’s tearing the sheets in his hands, but he just doesn’t give two damns.

Just as he’s coming down from the high of it, he feels John’s nails break his skin and then he goes stiff, bucking into Arthur so hard it skates him up the bed a solid inch or two. Arthur manages to unclench his hands from the sheets, feeling the crack of his knuckles, and reaches up to thread his fingers through John’s hair as he gasps through it.

John shivers and lets out a shaky groan that makes Arthur’s softening cock twitch. Gently, he guides John’s head down until it’s resting between the valley of his ribs, John panting harshly.

He’s still high enough off the sex that the relative discomfort of the position doesn’t even bother him. He can feel his own come on his skin, and John’s sweat sticking to him, but Arthur permits himself to lay in the mess they made of his bed, stroking absently through John’s tangled hair and staring at his water-stained ceiling.

Arthur thinks he might be content to just lay there for an approximation of forever, but eventually John stirs, sighing against Arthur’s chest. He pulls back just enough to get his arms under him, hoisting himself up so he’s not draped all over Arthur like a lazy cat. Arthur reluctantly lets his hands fall away.

Arthur can see the question forming before it even leaves his lips. “You don’t gotta check in with me every two seconds, I ain’t made of damn glass.”

“I know that,” John says. “But it’s - well, it’s been a time, Arthur. I ain’t sure if I know much about you at all anymore.”

That hits a nerve Arthur doesn’t realize was sore. He pushes at John’s shoulder, abruptly in desperate need of space. “Move,” he says.

John does, and Arthur clambers out of bed and disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door pointedly behind him.

His legs still feel like jelly, and it might have been kinder to himself to stay in bed and make John do that cleanup, but he’s not sure his pride could have taken it. He catches an accidental glance of himself in the mirror as he passes it by and can’t help but wince.

He’s a mess. John’s shirt is a lost cause. Looking at himself now, Arthur cannot help but wonder what John found so attractive. He strips, kicking the shirt aside to be forgotten about until later, and fights the sink until it grants him hot water.

He goes slow cleaning up but eventually he doesn’t have anything else to buy time for. He rubs his tired hands over his face, tries to bury the tight knot of anxiety rapidly unraveling in his gut, and heads back to the bedroom.

John’s stripped down, although he’s rescued the sheets from the floor. He twists to watch as Arthur crawls back into bed beside him and gives a very appreciative look over his naked skin. Arthur does his best to ignore it, tugging tightly at the blankets until John releases them.

“If you want a shower you’ll have to wait. Pretty sure I’m out of hot water,” Arthur says.

John snorts. “Is that your way of punishing me?”

“I wasn’t exactly planning on you comin’ around,” Arthur says evasively rather than admit he’d used most of it up stress cleaning his apartment to chase out the last traces of John. Look how well that’d worked out.

John rolls over on his back, stretching. “This doesn’t solve nothin’, you know that, yeah?” he says.

Arthur studiously does not look at him. They’re not cuddling, but they’re near enough that their shoulders brush. “I know.”

John turns his head and forcibly catches Arthur’s gaze. The sun is struggling to rise outside, and the red hue it casts over the room makes Arthur think of blood. “I get it,” John says. “Why you didn’t look. I don’t understand, but I get it. I get you.”

Arthur breathes out tightly. “It wasn’t that - it wasn’t that I didn’t want it. It was meant to end on that mountain, John. I wasn’t supposed to have anything else. I made my goddamn peace with that. I said my goodbyes.”

_I let you go_ , he thinks but does not say. The look on John’s faces says he heard it all the same.

“You wanna ask me what happened? After everything went to shit?”

“If you don’t tell me that you went on to live a long and happy life with your wife and child, I’m gonna -.”

John laughs harshly. “For a while, maybe. Abigail wanted - she wanted that. A ranch of our own. No more runnin’. Peace, or something like it I guess.”

“And you?”

“I’d already lost what I wanted,” John says, brutally honest. “I’d lost it several times already, but time it stuck.”

“John,” Arthur warns. “Don’t.”

John rolls over, hair falling in his face. Like this, he looks so much like how Arthur remembers that his heart hurts. Young. Jaded. A man incredibly out of time.

“I died, Arthur,” he says. “The rancher life? That wasn’t ever me. Couldn’t even make things work with Abigail, in the end. She deserved better than that. Better than what I could have given her.”

Arthur closes his eyes. The wave of grief that hits him doesn’t strictly belong to him - it belongs to another lifetime, to the people who used to dream of a tropical island and the hazy safety it promised. It doesn’t ease the strength of it.

“Goddamn it, John.”

Something touches his face and he opens his eyes to see John contemplatively running his fingers lightly over a thin scar across his temple. “Wolves?”

Despite himself, Arthur gives a tired smile. “Bar fight,” he says.

John makes a thoughtful noise. His hand slips down to cup the back of Arthur’s neck, drawing them together. Arthur thinks he’s going to kiss him, but their temples knock instead.

“What happened before,” John says, “it’s over with now, yeah? We got a second chance. The both of us did.”

“And this is what you want this time ‘round?” Arthur asks.

The look John gives him is unreadable. “Well, you had a bad habit of choosing for me before, so I think it’s about time I get to decide.”

Arthur stares back. Outside, traffic is picking up, and faintly through the window he can see the snow falling in earnest. For the first time in a very long time, Arthur has the revelation that he feels at home - that he feels _present_.

“Okay,” Arthur says. “Okay.”

.

Arthur wakes up late in the afternoon to the soft sound of his phone ringing.

Beside him John groans, face buried deeply in the pillow and one arm over Arthur’s waist. “Again?”

Arthur sleepily pats his hand before levering the arm off of him and squirming out of bed. “Go back to sleep, you useless idiot.”

John flips him off as Arthur struggles into his jeans with one hand, picking up the phone with the other. Major’s name is lighting up the screen. Arthur’s too content and sleepy to feel the flare of panic in his gut he knows it ought to.

He leaves the bedroom, shutting the door gently behind him and picks up.

“Wasn’t sure I’d be hearing from you this soon,” he says.

“Well, I figured if I waited for you to be the first one to pick up the phone I’d go grey first,” Major says. She pauses for a moment and then asks, “You haven’t run off again, have you?”

Arthur snorts, tucking the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he sets the kettle to boil. “Still here,” he confirms.

“Good. You have a bad habit of running away from all of your problems, and I’d have hated to chase you across the whole country.”

“I know,” Arthur says. “I’m - I’m working on it.”

Major doesn’t respond for a moment. Arthur digs out a fresh set of mugs and begins spooning coffee into them. Generously, he chooses not to give John sugar. Just this once. The kettle whistles sharply.

“You sound better than I thought,” Major says. “After yesterday.”

“I’ve had a weird couple of days,” Arthur says.

She falls silent again. Arthur pours out the coffee and carefully tries to figure out what to say. He can feel the silence between them so incredibly keenly, and he desperately does not want to misstep, to go back to that terrible moment in the kitchen where Major was looking at him as if she’d never seen him a day in her life.

Arthur knows who he is. He has always known. And he knows that the fact anybody at all ever wants anything to do with him is nothing short of a miracle.

Major says, “Things are real fucked, yeah?”

Arthur gives a small laugh, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. I could you could say that.”

“I love you,” Major says, so bluntly that it momentarily catches Arthur off guard. “Steve and I both. The moment I saw you bleeding out in that dumb bar I thought ‘that man’s going to be my best friend whether he likes it or not’. I wasn’t wrong then, and I’m not wrong now. Yesterday, you surprised me. But the only thing it changes is how I understand you, and that’s going to take some time to adjust to.”

Arthur feels so unsteady that he sets down his mug. He grips the bench and leans forward. “Is that right?”

“You were right. I don’t know what your life was like last time. I don’t understand the first thing about being an Incarnate - but I wanna learn whatever you’re willing to share. I’m probably not going to ever understand that part of your life, but I still want to know it.”

“It… it ain’t good, Major. Ain’t nothin’ I did the first time around that I oughta be proud of.”

“I don’t believe that for a second. The Arthur I know likes to pretend like he’s the devil, but is the kindest man I ever met.”

“You heard the part where I said I killed people?” Arthur says gruffly.

“I heard,” Major says. “And it doesn’t fill me with joy, but I think there are probably worse things in this world than what you did a hundred years ago to get by.”

Arthur wants to tell her that it was more than getting by - he wants to tell her about beating Thomas Downes bloody, he wants to tell her about all the innocent people that had the misfortune of getting caught in a hail of bullets just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He wants to tell her about that moment he’d realized how far he’d let himself fall. He wants to tell her a great many things, but he can’t bring himself to do it.

Long before John had come back into the picture, Major and Steve had been the only two people on his side. It seems strange to remember that he’s lived so much of this life without them, and then less strange when he considers the first thirty-odd years as not being much of a life at all.

“I ain’t gonna hold it against you if you wanna cut and run,” Arthur says, because it’s the right thing to offer. “That’s the least you deserve after everything.”

“How about you shut up and take the damn apology, Arthur Collins.”

“You don’t -.”

“Arthur.”

He can hear so much of Sadie Adler in her that it pulls him up short.

“Fine, fine. It’s - it’s fine.” He presses a hand to the side of the coffee mug nearest him and winces when he can feel how cold it’s gone. “Listen, Major, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the call, but -.”

“Go,” she says with a laugh. “Go enjoy your morning with the mysterious ‘John’ or whatever his name was.”

“It’s not -.”

Major hangs up. Petulantly, Arthur sets his phone aside and sets about trying to juggle the coffee. He’s too cold to stay out here much longer, and all he can think about is the warmth of John and the blankets waiting back in the bedroom.

John blinks awake as Arthur shoulders open the door. He’s on his stomach, blankets pulled up high, and his hair is ridiculously mused. There’s a pillow crease cutting through the stubble on his cheek.

“You look like shit,” Arthur says, handing him his mug as John struggles to sit up. “One ugly son of a bitch, ain’t you?”

John, who has never been a morning person in all the years Arthur has known him, just blinks at him. “Coffee?”

“I was nice and spared you the sugar even,” Arthur confirms as he settles against the wall, stealing as much of the blankets back from John as he can get away with. John squirms up to join him, head thunking down on Arthur’s shoulder.

“God,” John says. “I think you wore me out.”

Arthur smirks into his mug. “You weren’t even the one doing the hard work.”

John makes a contemplative noise and takes a sip of his coffee. Immediately his face scrunches up like a little kid confronted with a full dinner plate. “This is like ice. What the fuck were you doing in the kitchen? Watching the grass grow?”

Arthur takes a pointed mouthful of his own coffee. It’s lukewarm at best, but Arthur couldn’t care less. He thinks the whole roof could come down on them right now, and he’d scarcely notice at all. “You’re welcome.”

John sighs and slumps again, head hitting the crook of Arthur’s neck. He mumbles something, but it’s too quiet for Arthur to catch.

“Don’t you spill that coffee now,” Arthur warns. “I only got one set of sheets.”

“I know, I know,” John mutters, but he continues to list against Arthur until he’s a dead weight. Arthur waits patiently, and sure enough a moment later John lets out a tiny snore.

Gently, Arthur sits aside his own mug and then reaches for John’s, plucking it from his limp hands. John stirs slightly, turning his face further into Arthur’s skin until his hair is all that Arthur can see.

Arthur cannot possibly imagine him being comfortable, but John seems so content that Arthur doesn’t have the heart to wake him. He reaches up and gently moves John’s hair out of his own face, and then, when he realizes how surprisingly soft it feels, keeps running his fingers through it. If the sleepy snuffle he gives is indication, John doesn’t seem to mind.

Arthur stays like that, cold coffee in his hand and John warm and sleepy against his side.

And then he stays like that some more – for however long he can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all so much for the support, the kind comments, the brilliants messages, and the endless patience. I love these cowboys so much, and they deserve a goddamn happy ending. I cannot wait to write and share more for this universe <3 
> 
> twitter: @doingwritebyme  
> tumblr: glenflower


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